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August 24, 2011

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It's hard to know what to write about George Pataki, who inched closer to running for president today. I covered New York politics through his third successful campaign, in 2002, and his final term. But I never felt I had a crystal-clear sense of his ideology or approach to governance. His success came in large part from staying out of the political cut-and-thrust, and he never aspired to be the sort of well-known statewide public figure that some governors — like Nelson Rockefeller and both Mario and Andrew Cuomo — become. His talent, indeed, was for picking his spots and staying under the radar, projecting moderation and making big compromises while picking his policy battles.

Pataki's grand political deal was one of classic labor bargains: He engineered the conversion of Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield in a way that would provide $1.8 billion in raises to members of the state's most powerful union, Service Employees International Union. Critics noted that he was buying himself a third term at taxpayers' expense, but it was an amazing political coup, and the union, led by dealmaker extraordinaire Dennis Rivera, endorsed him and helped bring large chunks of the Democratic coalition, notably Hispanics, around to him. (Pataki was also the sort of diffident, hard-working pol who had actually learned to speak quite a bit of Spanish, and that didn't hurt either.)

Pataki may have been as conservative as a New York governor can be. He fought, particularly early in his tenure, to restrain taxes and spending; he made conservative appointments* and had an understated role in some of the conservative accomplishments of the Giuliani administration, notably the city's approach to welfare reform. And he was an eclectic blue-state Republican on an earlier model than even the more orthodox Tim Pawlenty: He was as staunch a supporter of abortion rights as any Republican and worked as hard as any Democrat to reduce carbon emissions.

Pataki's low-profile style may be the reason he's not taken as seriously as even, say, Jon Huntsman, who amassed a similar record in a much shorter tenure. But while he has sought recently to remake himself as a fiscal hard-liner, the larger problem is that he governed in an earlier era, when conservatives were allowed to pick their spots.

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